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Nukes for Food

What are we to make of North Korea’s seemingly sudden decision to halt its nuclear-weapons and uranium-enrichment programs, and to quit test firing long-range missiles? Pyongyang hasn’t sworn off these terrifying activities—just suspended them in exchange for shipments of food from the United States. So the response from Washington is suitably cautious. The message is: nothing here to get too excited about.

Still, this is by far the most promising signal of something like sanity from the land of the Kims (Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and now Kim Jong-un) in nearly a decade—since the Bush Administration scrapped the Clinton Administration’s deal, whereby we sent Pyongyang food and heavy oil, and they allowed International Atomic Energy Agency cameras and inspectors into their nuclear facilities. The Bush crowd called that arrangement “rewarding bad behavior,” and instead adopted a policy that amounted to no rewards from us, and much worse behavior from them.

Wednesday’s news of the softening of the North Korean line will surely be read, in part, as a result of the older Kim’s death and the new Kim’s ascent. Is Kim Jong-un more accommodating than his dad? Does he want to lead North Korea in from the cold?

There will no doubt be speculation, too, as to whether the new Kim has been watching and learning from the hardship the West is imposing on Iran—and the far greater punishment that Israel, and perhaps the United States, might inflict—to keep Tehran from acquiring a nuclear arsenal. It seems unlikely that the North Koreans would be cowed into submission by the Iranian experience, but we know so little about Kim Jong-un that the temptation to speculate about his behavior and motives is dangerously high.

All we can say at this point about Pyongyang’s announcement of a moratorium on nuclear-weapons work is that it’s not, in itself, bad news. For Washington, certainly, it probably should be counted as good news, no matter how cautious the optimism it engenders needs to be. But for Koreans, it really depends on where, on the peninsula, you see it from. For South Koreans, any easing up of the North’s bellicosity is a most welcome relief. For North Koreans, it is, as always, another story. What Kim Jong-un is saying is not that he renounces nukes, or has become a peacenik, but that his subjects are hungry.

That’s really the only thing that today’s news tells us for sure. The Kim dynasty has thrived on the misery of the masses. So when Pyongyang’s message is, “Will Suspend Nuke Program for Food,” it’s a good bet that the hunger in North Korea must be truly terrible.

Photograph: Xinhua News Agency/Eyevine.

Philip Gourevitch has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1995, and a staff writer since 1997.